13 Things People Forget About Combat

All Empire combat uses the One Second Rule. If a single person hits you more once in a single second you only lose one hit to that flurry of blows - no matter how many weapons they are using to hit you. There's no advantage to "drumrolling" someone (as its sometimes called), but if someone tries it you don't take damage more than once a second.

When attacking, you should avoid rapid flurries of blows that could confuse the opponent about how many blows they have taken.

Every time you are struck in combat you lose one hit. Every time - that includes with a wand, rod, or staff which do just as much damage as daggers, swords, and halberds. It also means that when a CLEAVE hits your medium armour, or an arrow smacks into your heavy armour, you still take a hit even if you don't suffer the CLEAVE or the IMPALE. Unless someone is clearly role playing a gentle tap to deliver their magical effect, it does you a point of damage.

If your arm or leg gets hit with a CLEAVE or an IMPALE, you lose the use of that limb. That limb has been *wrecked*! You might fight on with the loss of an arm, but you must drop anything that was held in that hand and you're not going to be using a two-handed weapon, a pole-arm, a staff, or a bow. If you lose a leg, you go *down* - you can defend yourself from the ground, but you cannot kneel, hop or move around. You need to roleplay accordingly - no Monty Python fighting here please.

Medium and heavy armour can protect you from a CLEAVE, and heavy armour can protect from an IMPALE ... but *only* if the blow hits the actual phys-rep of the armour! If the only protection on your lower arm is a leather bracer, then when an arrow hits that bracer your arm is IMPALEd even if you're wearing a heavy chain shirt or a metal breastplate.

If you do get your arm or your leg cleaved or impaled, you some specific medical attention. A physick with Cerulean Mazzarine (or a few minutes to spare), a magician with the restore limb spell, someone (maybe even yourself) with the right magic item, or a dose of Ossean Solution - these will all sort out a ruined limb. Just getting your hits back is not enough!

Blocks and parries are basically the same - you get something between you and the incoming hit. Most of the time, if you block or parry you counter the attack. The person making the attack doesn't usually lose their call, and you don't lose a hit or take any nasty effects. The big exceptions are ENTANGLE, REPEL, and STRIKEDOWN - if you block or parry them you don't lose any hits but you are still entangled, repelled, or knocked on your arse. Oh and SHATTER of course - if you block or parry a SHATTER then whatever you put in the way gets wrecked.

STRIKEDOWN is a mighty blow that knocks you off your feet, usually delivered by someone with a pole-arm. This means you go *down*! You can get back up but you have to hit the ground before you stand back up. You can't kneel, you can't combat roll and spring back to your feet like an Olympic gymnast. Your backside needs to touch the grass, or you need to go flying full length. STRIKEDOWN is serious business.

REPEL is usually delivered by a magic spell, and drives you away from the person who called it on you. When you get hit with REPEL you have to do one of two things - either retreat 20 feet, or move away from the person who repelled you for ten seconds. It doesn't matter which one you do - it all depends on how fast you think you can cover 20 feet!

Anyone can suffer a TRAUMATIC WOUND, representing things like broken bones, internal bleeding, punctured lungs and the like. If you're given a traumatic wound card by a referee it will have some roleplaying instructions on it, and may have some mechanical rules as well. There's ways to reduce or avoid the roleplaying effects but you can't ignore the mechanical rules - and if you don't get the traumatic wound tended to by a physick, they may well kill you. These wounds cannot be healed magically - only physicks can deal with them. When a physick checks you over, they can open your traumatic wound card and find out how to treat it - and what the consequences of leaving it untreated might be.

A bunch of stuff can happen to you in a combat - you can get a limb ruined with CLEAVE or IMPALE, you can get hit with VENOM or WEAKNESS, you might get CURSEd, you might get a traumatic wound. None of these things go away if you ignore them! Ruined limbs and the lingering effects of weakness and venom need treatment from a physick, magician, or potion. Traumatic wounds need treatment by a physician, or else they will run their course with potentially fatal consequences. If you end the event under weakness or venom, or with a limb ruined, you start the *next* even in the same condition!

While you're on zero hits, you're DYING. You fall over (no more than two paces from where you went to zero if its not a safe place to be on the ground). You must roleplay that you are dying and you must not take any action other than talking or screaming. That means you can't move under your own steam, fight, drink a potion (unless someone else is feeding it to you), activate a magic item or use any skill that doesn't explicitly say it can be used while you'redying.

But remember you *can* scream! There's no unconsciousness in Empire unless you choose to roleplay being unconscious. If a Druj is stood over you executing you, you can bellow your head off until your friends arrive. Likewise, there's no throat-cutting and no "subdual" damage - as long as you're still alive, you can shout!

Once you hit zero hits, you're bleeding out. A normal person has three minutes (180 seconds) before they are out of time. Once that happens, your character is dead. You might choose to become TERMINAL instead of just expiring there and then, but there is no way to come back from terminal and keep playing your character. Once you are dead, its time to head to GOD, let them know you died (or kill your character off on the computer yourself), and make a new character.